Is The Big Bang The Origin Of The Universe?

Image credit: grandunificationtheory.com

More than once, I’ve given The Kalam Cosmological Argument
in an online discussion with an atheist, and more than once, he’s rebutted me
saying that The Big Bang is not really the origin of the entire universe, but
just the origin of its expansion. Recently, in a Facebook post of mine that
went viral, an atheist left this comment. Here’s what he said verbatim “You have not proved reality has a beginning. You have
extrapolated the ‘apparent"’ expansion backwards. But you cannot assert
the expansion was the beginning of everything, or that it is consistent. It
also seems odd that you cling onto this scientific observation, but ignore what
doesn't suit.” Why is it that so many
Christian Apologists use The Big Bang to prove the second premise of The Kalam
Cosmological Argument, but several atheists deny that it is the beginning of
the universe?

First,
What Is The Big Bang?

The Big Bang theory states that
the universe was in a hot dense state 14 billion years ago, and started
expanding from that state. The first evidence of this was found in the early
1900s. In 1915, Albert Einstein formulated his General Theory of relativity.
Einstein’s theory predicted a universe that was either in a constant state of
expansion or contraction and Einstein was not comfortable with the implications
of this theory, so Einstein added a cosmological constant to his equations
(which many have called a “fudge factor”) to keep the universe walking on a
tight rope, if you will, between expansion and contraction. The problem is that
the kind of universe Einstein proposed was incredibly unstable. Even the
haulage of matter from one part of the universe to the other would upset the
balance and cause the universe to either start expanding or else contracting.
Einstein later called his constant “the greatest blunder of [his]
scientific career”. Einstein’s theory entailed that the universe was
expanding.

Later, the Russian Mathematician
Alexander Friedman, and the Belgian Astronomer George Lamatre, independently
formulated theorems that also entailed an expanding universe. Then later, in
1929, the American Astronomer Edwin Hubble looked through his telescope and
noticed something startling; the light from the red shifts in the galaxies
appeared to be “redder” than they should have been. Hubble concluded that the
redness of the light from the galaxies was because the galaxies were moving
away from one another. And why were they moving away from one another? Because
the universe was expanding. Now, for the first time, we had empirical evidence
to back up the theoretical evidence of Einstein, Friedman, and Lamaitre. The
scientific evidence shows that the universe is expanding.

This had startling theological
implications. If the universe is getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, as it
gets older, and older, and older, then that must mean that it was smaller, and
smaller, and smaller, in the past. If you were to watch the expansion of the
universe on a video, as the film runs forward, the galaxies and stars move
farther and farther out from one another, but if you were to rewind the film,
the stars would get closer and closer together. If you keep rewinding the
footage, the universe becomes as small as the period at the end of this
sentence. Rewind the footage further still, and the universe shrinks down to
nothingness. This at least seems to mark the beginning of the universe.

This can easily be seen from the
picture depicting the cosmic expansion at the very top of this blog post. The farther ahead in time you go,
the more the galaxies grow farther and farther apart. The
conclusion that the universe had a beginning is arrived at by backward
extrapolation. Mentally moving the universe’s expansion back in time causes the
universe to shrink down to a point of infinite density, a point where the
universe is smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. One need
simply move the expansion even further back in time and it shrinks down to
nothingness. This does seem to be the origin of the universe, of all matter,
energy, space, and time!

What does atheist think the big bang is? Does he think that the universe existed from eternity
past in an incredibly tiny state, and, for some reason just started expanding
14 billion years ago. If this is the case, then I must say that this seems like an incredibly ad-hoc response.
There’s just simply no reason to think that we can’t extrapolate the expansion all
the way back to an absolute beginning out of nothing. If the atheist wants to
maintain this position, he’s going to have to give us good evidence that this
is what occurred. Moreover, we have the mechanistic agent problem that I pointed out in my first blog post on The Kalam Cosmological Argument. If all matter, energy, space, and time existed in a tiny dot of a universe from eternity and all of a sudden began expanding a finite time ago, how do you explain why it didn't start expanding sooner? If the necessary conditions were in place for the universe to start expanding, it should have always been expanding, and yet it hasn't. Only a personal agent could be an eternally existing cause but only produce an effect a finite time ago.

What
Do Scientists Say?

What do scientists say? Do
scientists also agree with me and the Christian Apologists that the big bang is
the origin of the universe? If this is the case, then maybe…just maybe…the big
bang is in fact the origin of the universe. Please note that the list of quotes
below consist of both believing and non-believing scientists.

“Tune your television to any
channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is
accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you
complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth
of the universe.”

― Bill Bryson, [A Short History
of Nearly Everything]

"Together with Roger Penrose, I developed a new set
of mathematical techniques, for dealing with this and similar problems. We
showed that if General Relativity was correct, any reasonable model of the
universe must start with a singularity. This would mean that science could
predict that the universe must have had a beginning, but that it
could not predict how the universe should begin: for that one would have to
appeal to God." - Stephen W. Hawking, [“Origin of the Universe"
lecture]

"The conclusion of this lecture is that the universe
has not existed forever. Rather, the universe, and time itself, had a
beginning in the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago." -- Stephen
Hawking, [The Beginning of Time]

“It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable
men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the
proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a
past-eternal universe. There is no escape; they have to face the problem of a
cosmic beginning.” – Alexander Velinken, [Many Worlds In One]

What’s more is that several NON-Christian scientists have stated quite
candidly the theological implications of The Big Bang theory, and how
extremely similar the theory is to the biblical doctrine of creation out of
nothing found in Bible passages like Genesis 1 and John 1. Why would they say
things like this if The Big Bang theory really wasn’t the absolute beginning of
matter, energy, space, and time? Just look at what these non-Christian
scientists say!

“Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a
corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began
abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star,
every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth.And they have found that all this happened as
a product of forces they cannot hope to discover….That there are what I or anyone would call
supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.”
-- –Astronomer, physicist and founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space
Studies; Robert Jastrow.

“Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a
biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential
elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the
chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite
moment of time, in a flash of light and energy.” – Astronomer, physicist
and founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies; Robert Jastrow.

“The best data we have (concerning the Big Bang) are
exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books
of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.” - Arno Penzias, [New York
Times, March 12, 1978]

“Not only did the Big Bang model seem to give in to the
Judeo-Christian idea of a beginning of the world, but it also seemed to have to
call for an act of supernatural creation…” —J.M. Wersinger, Assoc.
Professor of Physics, Auburn University

Pulitzer Prize winning columnist George Will put it best: “Soon
the American Civil Liberties Union, or
People for the American Way,
or some similar faction of litigious secularism will file suit against NASA,
charging that the Hubble Space Telescope unconstitutionally gives comfort to
the religiously inclined.”

“There is no ground for supposing that matter and energy
existed before [the Big Bang] and were suddenly galvanized into action.
For what could distinguish that moment from all other moments in eternity? It
is simpler to postulate creation ex nihilo—Divine will constituting nature from
nothingness.” –English mathematical physicist Edmund T. Whittaker, winner
of the Copley Medal, which is the most prestigious award in British science.

Again, why would they say things like this if The Big Bang
Theory wasn’t the beginning of the universe? Why would they say things if “cannot assert the expansion was the beginning of
everything” as the atheist on one of my threads asserted?

Perhaps They’re Still
Clinging To Old Alternatives To The Big Bang

It’s possible that some atheists make this assertion because
they’re still holding onto old alternatives for The Big Bang. When the
scientific evidence for the big bang theory was mounting, atheist scientists
were greatly disturbed. They realized the theological implications that the
theory entailed (as the quotes above show). Therefore, they postulated a few
alternatives to the standard big bang model which would allow them to avoid
concluding that the universe sprang into being out of nothing a finite time
ago.

The Cyclical Model

One model championed by scientists was the cyclical model of
the universe. This theory stated that the universe was going through an eternal
cycle of expansions and contractions. The universe would expand from a tiny,
dense point for billions and billions of years but would eventually recontract
into the tiny dot that it expanded from on the previous go round. This cycle of
expansion and retraction, according to these theories, has been going on from
eternity past and will continue to occur in eternity future. This theory, if
true, would entail that the universe never began to exist, but is eternal.

This theory is no longer held by hardly any astronomers or
physicists. This is because this theory is plagued with several problems. The
first problem is that even if the universe will someday contract, no one knows
of a potential “bounce” mechanism which would cause the universe to undergo
another expansion. Secondly, the universe currently isn’t dense enough for
gravity to cause a retraction of the universe. Thirdly, even if the universe
did have a mechanism which would cause the universe to bounce back from a
retraction, and even if the universe were dense enough for gravity to pull the
universe back to a singularity, the amount of energy in the universe would not
be replenished. What that means is that whatever amount of useable energy the
universe contained on one round of expansion, it would have that exact same
amount of energy in the next round of expansion. What this entails is that the
energy required to cause the bounce mechanism to start new expansions after
each contraction would run out eventually. And thus, eventually, there would
come a time when the universe contracts but could never cause another expansion.
This means that there can only be a finite number of big bangs. It would mean
there would have to be a final big bang. But if you have a final big bang, you
had to have a first big bang. Hence, the universe is not eternal. As an
illustration, think of what happens when you drop a rubber ball. The rubber
ball has enough energy for it to bounce back several times, but it loses that
energy each time it makes contact with the ground. After several bounces, it
comes to a complete halt! That’s a good analogy of what the universe would do
on the cyclical model. Given that the bounce mechanism of the universe would
use up more energy after each cycle, the size of the expansions would get
smaller and smaller and smaller after each bounce.

Fourth problem; the infinite regress problem. The fourth
problem is not so much scientific as it is philosophical. What the cyclical
model proposed is just simply impossible! You cannot have actually infinite
number of past events. Why? Because the present event would never arrive if we
had to endure through an actually infinite number of past events. On the
cyclical model, before this expansion round could occur, the round before it
had to occur, but before that round could occur, the round before it had to
occur, and before that round could occur, the round before it had to occur, and
before that round could occur, the round before it had to occur, and so on back
to infinity! No expansion could ever take place because there would always be
an infinite number of expansion cycles which would have to take place first.
But then, how could this cycle be occurring right now? The most reasonable
explanation is that there either is no continuous cycle of expansions and
retractions, or at the very least we’ve endured through a finite number of
them.

The Steady State Model

Another attempt has been the steady state model. This theory was proposed in 1948 by Fred Hoyle
and Thomas Gold. According to this model of the universe, the universe is
expanding all right, however, its appearance never changes because as the
galaxies recede from one another new matter comes into being and takes the
place that used to be there.

This theory isn't held by many scientists anymore either.
There was never any experimental verification for this theory. It was always
trying to explain away the facts than make verifiable predictions. It never
explained any experimental predictions that the theory uniquely made.
Additionally, the observation of galaxies that were much father out
demonstrated that there were more radio galaxies in the past than in the
present. Therefore it demonstrated that the cosmos has not been in a steady
state after all.

The biggest problem for the steady state model was the
cosmic background radiation discovered in 1965 by Arno Penzias and Robert
Wilson. Scientists predicted that if the universe is expanding from a big bang,
then there should be residual radiation pervading the cosmos. This residual
energy was confirmed by accident when Penzias and Wilson were experimenting
with the Holmdel Antenna. Everywhere they turned the antenna, they picked up
static. Initially they thought it was bird droppings that was causing the
static, so they removed the bird droppings. However, they were still picking up
the static. It turned out the static was the cosmic microwave background
radiation predicted by the big bang theory! Penzias and Wilson won a Nobel
Prize for this discovery. No condition of a tiny universe billions of degrees
in temperature existed on the steady state model. Given that, the steady state
model was refuted and abandoned in favor of the standard big bang model.

Conclusion

We’ve seen that the internet skeptics are wrong. The Big
Bang Theory is the beginning of the universe. The question is,
what caused the universe to come into being? It surely must have had a
cause. After all, we’ve never known of anything to simply pop into being out of
absolute nothingness without a cause! But what was the cause? I submit to you
that the cause is a transcendent Creator. To see why I think that, check out
the blog posts “The Kalam Cosmological Argument” and/or “Is The Kalam Cosmological Argument A God Of The Gaps Argument?”